


Spiders Flee Before It

by ShapeShiftersandFire



Category: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Gen, Panic Attacks, Spiders, mild daemon separation, mythological daemons, poor ruth she deserves better, the ssttitd daemon au no one asked for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-10-02
Packaged: 2020-11-10 16:15:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20854634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShapeShiftersandFire/pseuds/ShapeShiftersandFire
Summary: Ruth hasn't seen her daemon since the day he settled.





	Spiders Flee Before It

**Author's Note:**

> _Spiders flee before the Basilisk, for it is their mortal enemy, and the Basilisk flees only from the crowing of the rooster, which is fatal to it._
> 
> -from _Most Macabre Monstrosities_

The day after she turns thirteen, Ruth wakes to an empty bed. Remy, as a cocker spaniel, had been curled up against her chest the night before. She’d fallen asleep to the rhythm of his breathing, to the warmth of his small body pressed against hers. Now, she’s waking up cold and alone and Rembrandt is nowhere to be seen.

_Gone? _Ruth sits up in a panic, her stomach tightens—_Where’s Remy? _He’s never left her alone before, never been out of her sight, never been more than a few feet from her, never disappeared around a corner or under the bed—

“Remy?” She can barely get his name out; her voice catches in her throat. Her chest tightens with fear, her hands shake as she looks frantically around the room. She can still feel him, knows she’s still with her, but he’s gone—

He’s not there, he’s not there—

He’s _gone—_

“_Remy!”_

_I’m here_.

Ruth grabs her pillow, clutches it to her chest, sits back against the headboard. It’s a poor attempt to recreate her daemon’s warmth. “Where?” Her voice has never been smaller.

The walls groan. The floor creaks. Ruth swears she hears the pipes shake; for a moment, the house feels out of place, and then it settles.

_Around, _Remy answers cryptically. _I’ll never be far._

Never be far? Then why is he out of sight?

Ruth grips the pillow with a whimper. Remy couldn’t have, he wouldn’t have, he _promised—_

_Not a spider, _he says. The genuineness in his voice is enough to ease Ruth’s fears. Her body relaxes but her mind doesn’t. What could her daemon possibly have settled as that warrants the need for him to be out of sight? For the house to make noise?

“What is it?”

There’s a pause. Then, _I don’t know. _And the house groans again.

* * *

Ruth knows there’s something Remy won’t tell her. He won’t describe his form, won’t tell her what it looks like, how big he is, _where_ he is, nothing. Instead, he tells her not to worry. He’s still attached to her and that’s what’s important. Nothing changed in their bond, only their proximity.

Something is undeniably wrong when Ruth takes her seat at the table for breakfast and her mother’s springer spaniel freezes. He stares intently, unblinking and unmoving, at Ruth, with a haunted fog in his eyes. Chuck’s unsettled but currently a chickadee daemon drops to the table from where she had been flitting around Chuck’s cereal bowl. Her feathers fluff up to a volume Ruth has only see in winter.

Her throat tightens as she stares between the two daemons, uncomfortable and unsettled. _They know_, she thinks, _they know Remy settled, they know what he is, they know he’s gone._ She bites her lip, hoping they don’t ask.

“Ruth, where’s Rembrandt?” Her mother sets the paper down and sets a hand on Bertrand’s head. The spaniel doesn’t shift his gaze from Ruth.

_What do I say?_

_They know I’ve settled, _Remy says, confirming her worst fears. (She knew from the beginning Remy’s odd behavior was settling related. He would never intentionally leave her alone like this.)

Ruth squirms. She’s not about to lie to her mother—she’s never been a good liar to begin with and her mother had drilled it into her the dangers of lying, “It’s a sin,”—but she doesn’t really have another option here. What would her mother do if she openly admitted that Remy was nowhere to be found?

“My pocket,” she mumbles, glancing down at her dress. It’s got pockets today, much to her relief. She spares glances between Bertrand and Chuck’s Hilde, silently begging Chuck not to call her bluff. “Dormouse today.” Remy had always liked hiding in her pockets, after all.

The answer placates her mother, even if it doesn’t entirely satisfy Bertrand, but none of that matters.

* * *

No matter where Ruth goes, she can always feel Remy. He’s never far away, though his presence is oddly nebulous. She’s gotten used to it over the last four years, having a Schrodinger’s daemon: everywhere and nowhere. He follows her to school, to home, to the library, to Tommy’s house (albeit, reluctantly. He’s never liked Tommy; he spooks Tommy’s Arilla the first time he tries to kiss Ruth). There’s seemingly nowhere Rembrandt can’t go.

Nowhere, it seems, except for the old Bellows house.

It’s far out of the way, up in an area overtaken by nature and where no one goes, where no one’s gone for years, except to fence the area off. But Chuck and his friends managed to find their way in, and so do Ruth and Tommy, who drove them to the place the begin with.

But the second they turn off the road, Ruth feels a tug she’s never felt before. It’s somewhere deep inside her, in a part of her core she can’t name, can’t pinpoint. It’s only a sharp, nagging pain at first, but the further they get from town, the worse it gets.

Her head spins, her stomach aches, and she wants _out_ of that car, but Tommy is seeing red and any verbal attempt Ruth makes at getting him to either turn the car around or drop her off _right here, right now_ fail. Her protests die as whimpers in her throat before she can even form the words.

Arilla, a settled Doberman, shuffles around in the back seat, too caught up in her counterpart’s thirst for revenge that she fails to notice Ruth’s discomfort. (Not that she ever really cared about Ruth to begin with.)

_Remy..._

Remy doesn’t answer, and the radiating pain grows worse and worse and worse—

\--and Ruth thinks she blacks out—

\--and then she’s tumbling out of the car as Tommy grinds it to a halt outside of the old mansion she’s heard about but never seen in person. The rounded corner tower fades in and out of her vision as she leans on Tommy’s car. He’s shuffling around behind her, doing something she can’t quite hear; the sounds are muffled, she can’t feel Remy, she can’t—

Ruth finally crumples to the ground. _Remy…_ She wretches once, twice, three times, and then the feeling eases. The ground is comfortably cold, it eases the uncomfortable warmth flowing through her body (And that’s the moment she realizes—this is separation. She’s gone too far from Remy). She has no intention of getting up anytime soon, her legs are too weak to support her and her head’s still spinning.

“Remy?”

_Close as I can get, _Remy says. His words are strained, followed by a croon of distress.

“Too far ‘way,” Ruth mumbles, shivering and sweating and waiting for as much of the feeling to pass as it can before she tries to stand up. Somewhere behind her, Arilla barks; Ruth curls in on herself, wishing she had Remy’s warmth to comfort her. She may have gotten used to her daemon’s near-but-far presence, but this is too much, too far.

When the barking and the shuffling stops is when Ruth forces herself up. She’s leaning on the hood of the car when Tommy comes around. He spares her a quick, apathetic <strike>drunken</strike> look before heading up the stairs to the house, baseball bat in hand and Arilla in tow.

(He doesn’t know about Remy and he doesn’t care enough to ask.)

Ruth tags along behind, slowly but surely making her own way up the stairs. The feeling of cold begins to seep into her limbs again. Nausea churns her stomach. But still she shuffles up the old wooden stairs and into the old house. Her brother and Hilde are in there, she’s not about to leave them behind. Or at Tommy’s mercy.

When she stumbles into the house, leaning on rotting walls, bouncing back and forth between dusty, moldy furniture and the walls, Tommy is leaning on an old spice rack, blocking her brother’s only way of escape from some basement stairwell. Her heart pounds. She’s without Remy—really without Remy—and she doesn’t have the stomach to confront Tommy. Bravery has never been one of her strong suits and she knows it.

(It’s why she ended up with him in the first place.)

From the way he’s talking, the way Arilla blocks the door, the way Stella’s dingo Barnabas snarls at her despite being half her size, Ruth knows he’s going to leave them there. She’s going to have to be brave. For her brother, for Stella, for Remy, for herself.

“See you later,” Tommy says, and begins to slide the door shut.

“Wait! You can’t do that!” Among the group’s protests, Ruth’s is the loudest, and the only one Tommy answers to. She hobbles to Stella’s side, putting herself between Tommy and his Doberman without her own daemon. It’s a risk she has to take.

Tommy leans on the doorframe. His jaw twitches habitually, grinding the stem of a piece of straw that isn’t there. “Yeah?” He’s going to do it anyway, she knows it.

“Yeah,” Ruth says meekly. She looks over her shoulder at the group, meets her brother’s eyes, then looks back to Tommy. “He’s my little brother.”

But instead of letting them out, Tommy shrugs indifferently and shoves Ruth backward into Stella. “You can stay with them, then.” The door slides shut and locks before she can protest further.

The force sends Ruth reeling. She stumbles backward into a web-laden indent in the wall; there’s no time to panic over being too far from Remy, being locked away from him—she’s panicking over the webs hugging her face and shoulders, over the spider that might be on her, that might have bitten her—

“_Get it off, get it off!”_

Auggie’s there in an instant, brushing the webs from her hair until it’s all off and pulls her away from the wall. And that’s when Ruth properly collapses and lets the panic over Remy’s absence consume her.

“Remy,” she whimpers, “Remy—he’s not—we’re not—“ Every breath is an effort to take. Every ragged gasp tears at her throat.

_Can’t breathe, I can’t breathe—_

_I need Remy, I want Remy, I want Remy. Remy! Remy!_

_Ruth!_

That’s her daemon’s voice, but it’s so far away, so distant. So faint. She swears she hears him trying to call her again, but it’s drowned out by the blood rushing in her ears and the pounding of her heart.

_REMY!_

“—Remy?”

Auggie’s concerned face comes back into focus. His hands are clasped firmly around her shoulders. He’s trying to bring Ruth back to herself. “Where’s Remy?”

_She’s never told him about Remy, she’s never told any of them about Remy—_

A cough is the only answer she can give.

“Ruthie?” Now Chuck’s hand is on her shoulder. She’s never longed for her brother as much as she does not, alone and away from her daemon. “Ruthie, what’s wrong? Where’s Remy?”

“Ou—outside,” she chokes out. _Chuck is the only one she’s ever told about Remy. _“Too far.” _I need him._

“It’s okay, Ruthie.” Chuck takes her from Auggie and into a half-hug. Hilde, settled as a coati, lingers nearby, too far for Ruth’s comfort, too close for Chuck’s. “We’ll get out of here. We’ll get you back to Remy.”

And somehow, they do. The basement door swings opened and the group, after a stunned moment of silence, makes their bid for freedom. Every step Ruth takes back into town gets easier and easier; the closer she gets, the more she can feel Remy. It’s a rush of relief Ruth has never known. When she steps onto the sidewalk, she swears the ground shudders with relief.

* * *

It's a spider bite, and it gets worse. Ruth hadn’t realize that’s what it was at first; she’d assumed it was a zit. But the timing is too close and it doesn’t feel the same. If anything, something about it feels _wrong. _

Ruth knows, because Remy spends the day grumbling enough for both of them. The house trembles each time. The bathroom faucet shakes.

(She still has yet to figure out what in the world her daemon settled as that could make the _house _shake.)

The morning before she goes to school finds her trying to cover it with makeup with mixed results. It looks better, but not quite as concealed as Ruth would like.

_It’s wrong, _Remy says. His discomfort radiates through Ruth’s body in waves. Every sound he makes sends tremors through the walls.

“What is it?” she asks.

Remy doesn’t elaborate.

The house groans.

* * *

The play is due to start in fifteen minutes, but instead of focusing on her last minute preparations, Ruth is focusing on the zit that is most definitely a spider bite and getting increasingly worse. It’s bigger than it was that morning when she first tried to cover it up, she swears it.

And she swears Remy is crankier. More agitated. Every building she’s walked into has trembled at its foundation.

Still, Remy refuses to tell her what’s wrong.

Maybe he doesn’t know or doesn’t have the words. Or maybe he knows and he doesn’t want to worry Ruth on her big night. She wishes he would at least tell her one way or the other, but he insists on grumbling and shaking the town instead.

(“Use your words, Rembrandt,” she scolds, and gets a huff in return.)

Ruth leans forward in the mirror. The bite is definitely bigger. And it definitely looks like it could pop if she breathed wrong. It won’t, and that’s part of the problem. No matter what she does, it won’t break, and she’s quickly reaching a limit with the amount of concealer she can put on it.

At this rate, she may have to accept that it’s going to be visible.

(Or she can skip the show. That’s an option, too.)

The girl next to her, Macy, fixes her with a sympathetic frown. “Oh, honey, you have _got _to do something about that,” and it steels Ruth’s resolve. She takes a few tissues from the counter, slaps them over the spot on her face, and slips out the back door with a few glances over her shoulder.

With each step she takes, the floor shakes.

“Remy,” she whispers, “I’m scared.” His feeling of _off_ is beginning to sink in deep. Ruth swears she can feel it getting bigger with each passing second.

Remy’s deep, guttural growl echoes through the empty halls. _I’m right here, Ruthie. Nothing will touch you tonight. _

Ruth whimpers. Something in the way he says it makes her stomach turn more than the red spot on her face, which, as she slips into the bathroom and looks in the mirror, has _definitely _gotten bigger.

“Remy, it’s worse.”

Another rumble, this time a mix of anger and reassurance. And closer.

(Closer than Remy has ever been since he settled.)

“Remy…” Ruth leans toward the mirror, the spot on her face redder and angrier and very much ready to burst. Her hands shake as she reaches up to give it a gentle squeeze…

And the moment that follows is a slow one of a rapid succession of events.

A small black leg pokes out of the bite.

A pair of glowing gold eyes Ruth has never seen before appears in the mirror.

Ruth stares into them. “Remy?”

And then the first spider crawls out.

At the same time that Ruth screams and more spiders crawl from the bite, the wall of the bathroom falls away in a storm of ceramic and glass and water with a feral roar.

Ruth screams—the spiders are _EVERYWHERE—_in her hair, in her face—

_There’s a giant snake in the bathroom—_

Roaring—

Screaming—

_“Remy, get them off!”_

_REMY—_

** _REMY—_ **

She can’t focus—there’s too much—spiders—Remy—spiders—_Get them off!—_giant snake—spiders—roaring—spiders spidersspidersspidersspIDERSSPIDERS—

Another roar and Remy’s voice blazes in her mind, cutting through the thick layers of primal fear—_GET THEM **OFF—**_

_Ruth, I’ve got you!_

_OFF OFF **OFF OFF OFF—**_

_RUTH—!_

She claws at her hair, her face, her dress—_OFF OFF—GET AWAY—_she backs into the first corner she can find, in the crook of something cold and uneven and she curls up and screams because it’s all she can do—

\--it’s still writing, that damn book is still writing, it’s close but Stella can almost _feel_ the words coming to life under her hands—

Ruth is still screaming—_still alive—_when they burst through the doors—she’s in the bathroom, they’re not far—

_SPIDERS—_an ocean of them, tearing down the hall, swerving around the groups’s ankles, completely and utterly ignoring them, hellbent on getting away—

“_Ruthie!”_ chuck takes the lead, Stella’s opened the book to Ruth’s story, the red is still covering the pages, the words are still coming—

They’re at the bathroom door—

And the words stop.

The story is unfinished.

Stella doesn’t try to dodge the spiders, neither does Barnabas, charging straight through them, they follow Chuck into the bathroom—

And there’s more screaming: Ruth, in terror; the group, in shock: Ruth sits, cowering and wailing, in the coil of a massive dark blue-gray snake. It roars, its teeth are the size of Stella’s hand—

\--there’s a gaping hole in the bathroom wall where it emerged—

_Basilisk!_

Chuck doesn’t care or doesn’t notice, he climbs over the basilisk’s body to reach his sister—

_Ruth—daemon—basilisk—_

_Remy._

_“Get them off!”_

_“Ruthie!”_

Another roar—and there’s Chuck, prying her hands away from her face, over and over, “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s over, you’re safe,” while Ruth tells him over and over, “Get them off, get them off, get them off—“

_They’re all gone, Ruthie—_

Her chest is tight, her skin crawls, she can’t breathe—they’re not off, not off, not off—_EVERYWHERE—_

_“REMY!”_

_Look at me._

A narrow, reptilian face, arms with dozens of sharp fangs, stares down at her with the same gold eyes she saw in the mirror.

Ruth gasps for breath, she’s curled in the body of this massive—_spiders—_snake—and Chuck—_spidersspidersspiders—_she wails, hiding herself in Chuck’s arms.

“They’re gone, Ruthie, they’re all gone—“

She doesn’t believe it, doesn’t, can’t, there’s still one on her face, she can feel it—

“He’s a basilisk, Ruthie! They’re afraid of him!”

It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, he could be a squirrel, it doesn’t matter, spiders don’t fear anything—

Remy’s massive head comes down to Ruth. His scaly nose grazes her shoulder, hot breath warms her face. _I chased them off, _he promises, but Ruth swears they’re still _there—_

_They’re gone._

Can’t breathe, _can’t breathe—_but somehow Ruth raises her head—

And Remy is right. The bathroom is destroyed (there’s faint screaming somewhere in the distance, muffled by the sound of water gushing from the wall), but there’s not a spider in sight. As for her—Ruth fights the urge to vomit but looks herself over and discovers she’s very much spider-free, even if she can still feel them.

“Basilisk,” someone says.

Ruth’s head spins, she’s shaking, she clings to Chuck, Hilde’s paws rest on her shoulders, need to breathe, need to breathe…

Then Remy growls, stretches his neck out, reaches for something in Stella’s hands—_that damned book—_

And bites.

**Author's Note:**

> ruth - rembrandt "remy" - basilisk  
stella - barnabas "barney" - dingo  
tommy - arilla "rill" - doberman  
chuck - hilde "dee" - coati  
auggie - january "jan" - donkey  
ramon - carolina "lina" - european finch
> 
> \-------  
apparently the "spiders flee before it" bit is not a universal truth for the basilisk but oh well. unintentional harry potter crossover ig.


End file.
